I've spent years exploring health, mental health, and science as a journalist based on the Left Coast. I covered west coast biotech and science for Bloomberg News and contributed to dozens of publications including Bloomberg Business Week, Mother Jones, Salon, Health magazine, Reader’s Digest, Parenting, and the Los Angeles Times. I’m interested in how and why the wealthiest country in the world has such an irrational healthcare system that develops brilliant new therapies while overtreating many and underserving even more. I'm also deeply interested in efforts to make our communities healthier by ensuring that everyone has access to the things that foster good health -- good food, safety and the chance to be physically, politically and socially active.

As parents, we’ve always kind of known that handing our cell phones to our young kids to entertain them in the car or occupy them in the supermarket wasn’t necessarily the greatest idea. And we may have worried that getting them their their own phones in middle school might divert them a bit from their homework or fuel their addiction to screens.

But what most of us probably didn’t know was that the explosion of mobile apps aimed at kids would enable game-makers and their partners to spy on our kids and compile digital dossiers about them and their purchasing habits. Yet according to a report released yesterday by the Federal Trade Commission, that’s exactly what has happened.

Within seconds of a child connecting to an app on their mobile phone, unique information about the phone number, the device and its geographic location starts flowing to the maker of the app—and the third-party marketing and advertising firms they supply, the report said.

“Using the device ID and other information obtained from multiple apps, these third parties could potentially develop detailed profiles of the children using the apps, without a parent’s knowledge or consent,” the report concluded.

To conduct the study, Commission staff members searched the Apple and Android app stores, which each contain more than 700,000 apps. Using “kids” as their key search term, they randomly selected 200 of the first 480 apps found on each site for testing and evaluation. Here’s what they found:

•Fifty-nine percent of the apps transmitted the ID of the device to the app’s developer or “an advertising network, analytics company or other third party.” Only 20 percent of them disclosed that they were doing this or provided any information about privacy practices.

•Fifty-eight percent of the apps reviewed had advertising built in yet only 15 percent of them told parents and their kids about the advertising before the app was downloaded.

•Seventeen percent of the apps allowed users to purchase virtual goods within the app. While both the Apple and Android app stores provided some notice about apps that have the capacity to make purchases, the information wasn’t prominent and was frequently hard to understand, the report said.

The report was the second this year by the Commission to evaluate the privacy and disclosure information provided to parents by app developers and pronounce them “disappointing.”

“We haven’t seen any progress when it comes to making sure parents have the information they need to make informed choices about apps for their kids,” FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said in a statement. “In fact, our study shows that kids’ apps siphon an alarming amount of information from mobile devices without disclosing this fact to parents.”

The agency is pursuing multiple investigations of app developers, looking for possible violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Privacy advocates say the law, passed in 1998, is outdated and hasn’t kept up with the rise of smart-phones, apps and text messaging.

As Anton Troianovski reported in the Wall Street Journal in September, Big Food companies like McDonald’s and J&J Snack Foods, maker of SuperPretzels, are among the biggest and most blatant users of apps and mobile games to entice kids and hook them on food products. The story described one four-year-old New Jersey girl who uses her mother’s iPhone to play games like “Cookie Dough Bites Factory” and “SuperPretzel Factory.”

“The apps are certainly targeted at kids,” Melinda Champion, vice president of marketing at J&J Snack Foods, told the Journal, “If you get the kids saying, ‘Mom, I would love a SuperPretzel,’ mom will often buy it for them.”

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